“There are a lot of good Sydney restaurants but I love going to Europe, to Italy. You come in here and you could be in one of those classy Italian restaurants. It is a completely different feeling from Sydney restaurants."

With its chandeliers, arched (and slightly stained) mirrors, leather banquettes, starched white tablecloths, waiters in long black aprons, flocked wallpaper – it does seem like a little piece of Europe in the city.

We choose a very Sydney lunch, however. Oysters, salad and grilled sand whiting. No wine today, even though we meet at the beginning of a lazy January. Just mineral water.

Susan Ryan was an icon for women in the 1970s and ’80s and she really hasn’t changed much. She has aged gracefully: the same elfin face, the same classic attire. Today she wears a jacket in shades of grey from the German designer Basler with the standard black slacks and tank top.

From the minute she sits at the table, she is leaning forward to engage her listener (me) in a conversation that somehow feels like being drawn into a secret discussion. A “tell all" session. Ryan has that sort of personality – she can probably do it to the postman.

And she is just as passionate about age discrimination as she was about sex discrimination half a century ago.

In 1962, when 20-year-old Susan Ryan decided to marry then junior diplomat
Richard Butler
(who would later go on to become UN weapons inspector), she was shocked to find that she had almost completely blown up her career prospects. She lost her teaching scholarship – was refused entry to a diploma of education at the end of her arts degree – and had to pay back all scholarship payments ever received from the Department of Education.

“It didn’t happen to the blokes," she says. “When I tell that story today, [young women] think that I am making it up."

But that’s the way it was in the Australia of the 1960s. Until 1967, when a woman got married, she had to resign from her job in the Commonwealth Public Service.

It was tough for women. And the experience bred some tough women fighters, among them Ryan,
Anne Summers
and
Eva Cox
. All of them are still activists.

When Ryan divorced Butler in the early 1970s (they have two children), she became engaged in politics. It was the Whitlam era. Ryan was one of the founders of the Women’s Electoral Lobby in Canberra, and at the age of just 33, and as a single mother, she was elected to the Senate in the very same election that just about annihilated the Whitlam Labor Party (post the 1975 sacking).

When Bob Hawke regained power for Labor in 1983, Ryan was catapulted straight into cabinet as education minister and minister assisting the prime minister on the status of women. The Sex Discrimination legislation followed in 1984 and the Affirmative Action Act in 1986. She retired from the Senate in 1988 after a bruising battle within cabinet over the reintroduction of university fees.

Did this firebrand leave Parliament too early?

“I probably should have stayed longer," she concedes. “But it is hard to know." As it happened, she had been reminiscing on that period just a few days earlier,

“We had the release of the first 25-year cabinet papers [covering the Hawke government]. It was so fantastic that first couple of years. What we managed to do. By the time we were getting up to 1988, though, I wasn’t feeling that we were doing a lot. I had done the women’s stuff, I had lost the fight on university fees. I was so personally attached to [the idea of] ‘no fees’. I just saw it as one of the ways government can really affect what happens to people. People with degrees do better, stay in the workforce longer, the whole thing rolls on and on."

Ryan was offered the top job at Penguin Australia after Brian Johns moved on to head up SBS. She grabbed the opportunity but eight months later she was out.

“It was a bit like a rebound romance," she says. “Having worked in the frenetic pressure cooker kind of way you do in Parliament, I didn’t give enough thought to how it would be [at Penguin], who I would be working with. I sort of said, ‘Oh that sounds fantastic’, and jumped."

Since then Ryan has done the hard yards – a stint representing the Australian Plastics Industry and then a career in superannuation and insurance. She was president of the Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees for eight years until 2007, had stints on the ASX Corporate Governance Council and the board of the University of NSW, was chairwoman of the Australian Human Rights Group and deputy chairwoman of the Australian Republican Movement.

She has been unfailingly energetic and, she admits, has never lost the art of networking. All excellent training for her current role.

So what will be the big achievement from her five-year term as Age Discrimination Commissioner – what can be the equivalent to the legislation she pioneered in the 1980s?

“In five years," Ryan says, “I would like to see a general assumption that 70 is a more appropriate age for most people’s retirement."

But you are 70, and have just taken on a five-year job, I point out, unable to resist the jibe.

“I know. I know – but for most people," she retorts.

Ryan’s big plan for this year is to convene a national conference of major employers, human resources professionals and recruiters.

“All the analysis says that you can’t afford to lose your older workers. I want to change the attitude of employers and I am starting with the major employers because they have got the capacity to be able to try new things, to offer part-time work – whatever they have to do. [I want them to] lay out what they are doing to retain older workers and to hire older workers," she says.

“I suppose where I am coming from is trying to get employers, instead of shoving people out when they are 52 or 53, to look at their workforce and say: Well, how many have we got over 50? What are they doing? Are they performing well, do they need some training? Perhaps we better ask them if they wish to stay on for another 10 years – if so they might want to work part-time."

It is what Ryan asked the major employers to do back in 1984 : look at their workforce and see who was there.

“When we did the affirmative action legislation, most employers didn’t know how many women they had," she says.

She believes that if she can at least get employers to focus on the make-up of their workforce, she will be making progress for older workers.

“I am optimistic because there is a lot of very good analysis now saying that Australia has a skills shortage, [and that] it can’t all be filled by immigration. And although we are getting more and more kids into university, they can’t come out of university and perform [on] day one like someone who has been in the workforce for 30 years. So there is a gap and the gap is best filled by keeping your older workers longer," she says.

But how is she going to make employers feel guilty about not looking after ageing people – compared to, say, promoting more women?

“I don’t think that I will be going the guilt track," Ryan says. “It doesn’t work. I will be going the productivity track." She points to a recent study by Deloitte Access Economics, Where Is Your Next Worker?.

“They go through the possibilities but their main point is that your next worker is either retired or about to retire," she says.

As Ryan sees it, you are a long time retired.

“People who retire at 55, women especially, will be longer retired than they were ever in the workforce. That is huge. Especially women who struggled to get into proper jobs in the workforce – they just got in and are now facing endless hanging around, a bit of golf or bingo or whatever they do," she says.

There are more specific measures Ryan is ready to attack – particularly in insurance and super. For example, workers over 65 don’t have to be covered for workers compensation. They can’t get income protection insurance. And until new laws from the middle of next year, they don’t come under the 9 per cent super guarantee charge either.

“I would like employers generally to have a policy to extend working life. I wouldn’t look at this stage to try and get a legislative requirement and I wouldn’t at this stage go to the ASX and say would you establish a requirement. Maybe if nothing happens over the next five years, there may need to be something else. But I am hoping the business case will be so strong they will do it," she says.

Lunch hour is well and truly passed by this point. As I walk away across Hyde Park, I feel I have been on a trip from the ’60s and ’70s right through to today. The theme for Ryan remains the same: So much to fight for; so much to gain.